7 papers
Where are Gaia's small black holes?
M. Fishbach, K. Breivik, R. Willcox +1
Gaia has recently revealed a population of over 20 compact objects in wide astrometric binaries, while LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) have observed around 100 compact object binaries as gr…
Binarity at LOw Metallicity (BLOeM): a spectroscopic VLT monitoring survey of massive stars in the SMC
T. Shenar, J. Bodensteiner, H. Sana +74
Surveys in the Milky Way and Large Magellanic Cloud revealed that the majority of massive stars will interact with companions during their lives. However, knowledge of the binary p…
Good things always come in 3s: trimodality in the binary black-hole chirp-mass distribution supports bimodal black-hole formation
Reinhold Willcox, Fabian R. N. Schneider, Eva Laplace +7
The latest GWTC-4 release from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) collaboration nearly doubles the known population of double compact object mergers and reveals a new trimodal structure in…
A high fraction of close massive binary stars at low metallicity
H. Sana, T. Shenar, J. Bodensteiner +74
At high metallicity, a majority of massive stars have at least one close stellar companion. The evolution of such binaries is subject to strong interaction processes, heavily impac…
New gravitational-wave data support a bimodal black-hole mass distribution
R. Willcox, F. R. N. Schneider, E. Laplace +7
Detailed stellar evolution and supernova models yield a bimodal black-hole mass distribution with a narrow peak around 10 solar masses from stars within a narrow range of progenito…
Rapid stellar and binary population synthesis with COMPAS: methods paper II
Ilya Mandel, Jeff Riley, Adam Boesky +13
The COMPAS public rapid binary population synthesis code has undergone a number of key improvements since the original COMPAS methods paper (Team COMPAS: Riley et al., 2022) was pu…